Warren’s negatives too heavy

I told a friend last week that I thought Elizabeth Warren — smart, attractive and appealing — was in trouble. My friend agreed.

“She’s too drab and schoolmarmy,” said my friend, who isn’t a fan of Scott Brown. “She gets on my nerves.”

The wife of a colleague had this to say: “If I hear the word ‘hammered’ come out of her mouth one more time, I’m going to hit her with one.”

These women tend to be liberally-minded and inclined to vote for a female Democrat. Yet they and others have used similar language to describe the female Democrat trying to unseat Brown: Stiff. Whiney. Preachy. A know-it-all. Annoying.

When Warren announced her bid for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat, jubilant supporters believed that Brown’s days were numbered. The popular Harvard Law professor was a nationally-known Wall Street foe who boasted strong credentials as a champion of the middle class. In her first six weeks, she raised $3 million. By the end of December, she’d raised $5.7 million, close to double the dough raised by the incumbent.

So what happened?

Largely, it’s those commercials. The ones that saturated the airwaves, where Warren looked straight at the camera and lectured in a way that bugged us, for reasons we couldn’t fully explain. Our negative reaction was largely visceral. We couldn’t quite put our finger on why she turned us off with her earnest exhortations for students and the struggling working class; she just did.

Meanwhile, Brown’s television ads show him driving around in his pickup, chatting at the camera with his easy, I’m-the-guy charisma, apparently too busy legislating to pull over for even a second. Say what you want about his politics, if you’ve managed to decipher them, but the guy is innately likable. Interestingly, so is Warren. I followed her around last winter when she came to Worcester, and those who met her one-on-one found her warm and engaging, qualities that for some reason have failed to transcend the screen.

Her handlers finally realized this and recently revamped her television campaign. The new ads show her mingling with voters, chatting with children and listening to old people. The one thing she’s not doing, conspicuously, is speaking. Other people are doing that, with voice-overs intoning, “For all the people who played by the rules but find the system rigged against them. Know this: Your fight is Elizabeth Warren’s fight.”

The ads are considered a big improvement over the ones where voters were subjected to her actual voice and opinions, even though the message is basically the same.

This, too, spells trouble for Warren. A candidate appears in a television ad, speaking in her normal, God-given voice, and the ads are so off-putting to voters that her campaign goes to great lengths to make new ones in which she’s not allowed to talk. It’s like one of those high-concept commercials that never show the product.

I’m guessing the reaction might be different if Warren’s script was delivered by Brown, or any good-looking male candidate. We tend to be hard on our female politicians, and even harder on older ones. With her sensible glasses, neatly-cropped hair and cardigans, she’s often referred to as “granny,” even though, at 62, she happens to be quite attractive. But women politicians can’t make mistakes. They can’t be too shrill, too assertive, or too ignorant of the machinations of the Boston Red Sox.

None of it is fair, but it makes no difference. This is politics, where likeability is gold and superficiality reigns. The more laundry Scott Brown folds for his beautiful family, the more women swoon.

Significant differences exist between these candidates. In yet another campaign that has seen style trump substance, the debates can’t come soon enough.